The dust is settling at the Adair County Collector’s Office as the new year starts.

Leading up to the end of the year, Adair County County Collector David Erwin and his staff receive and process about $14 million in tax payments for Adair County’s 15 various taxing entities.

Erwin said the 2012 collections and the past few months have been typical of any tax season, with the majority of residents paying their complete real estate and personal property taxes well before the Dec. 31 deadline.

“By the afternoon of the last day, those who are going to pay have and those who aren’t aren’t coming in at the last moment,” Erwin said, although he did note someone dropped off several tax payments about an hour after the office closed Monday, the last day of business for the year.

With tax bills out to residents in mid-October, Erwin said most tax payers have met the Dec. 31 deadline, but his office still collects payments nearly every day of the year.

“If everyone paid their taxes on time, we’d only be [taking payments] from October to December each year,” he said.

On Wednesday, the first business day of the new year, Erwin estimated his office received about $5,000 in delinquent tax payments.

Currently serving his fourth term as county collector, Erwin has also monitored those delinquent payments, observing a spike in the delinquency rate of personal property payments that mirrored both local and national economic trends.

The percentage of payments being received as delinquent spiked in the year following the 2008 recession, while decreasing from 2010 to 2011 in a hopeful sign for the area’s economy.

Another indicator of improvement is the total taxes collected on county personal property, items like tractors, vehicles and boats. While the amount collected on those items has decreased anywhere from 3 to 7 percent annually since 2006, that trend was snapped in 2011 when the county saw an about 5 percent increase.

Erwin pointed to those numbers, saying he believed the decrease was likely due to factors like residents were not buying new cars during the height of the economic recession, most notably in 2008 and 2009.

And while the 2011 numbers showed the first improvement for the past six years, it still puts the county at the same level it was at in 2009 in terms of personal property taxes collected.

For 2012, Erwin said he expects to collect about $14 million in personal property, real estate and railroad and utility tax payments, with more than $10 million accounted for in real estate taxes. He was unable to provide a collection total as of Jan. 2, but said he would likely have a more complete tally later in the week and the final numbers sent to the county treasurer to be distributed by the end of the month.

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“It feels good,” Erwin said of serving during the busy tax season. “It’s like providing a service to the residents of the county. And I think most people realize it’s not the collector taking the tax. Voters approved all this stuff, all these taxes. It’s not just us saying, ‘Let’s charge this person this much.’”

Any payments made now will be considered delinquent and subject to a 2 percent interest charge and a 7 percent penalty charge and an additional 2 percent interest per delinquent month up to 16 percent a year.

Erwin said of the 7 percent penalty charge, 3 percent goes to Adair County’s General Revenue fund, 2 percent goes to the county’s retirement fund and 2 percent goes to the county collector’s tax maintenance fund for office operations. All interest accrued on delinquent taxes is distributed to the various taxing entities based on their proportionate levy.

Of the more than 15 various entities that could receive a portion of a tax payer’s bill, about 70 percent of the total is typically paid to the various school districts in that taxing area.

By the numbers

- 6.52 The percent of delinquent taxpayers in 2011, down from 8.98 percent in 2010.

- $51M The assessed personal property tax value in Adair County in 2011. It was an increase over 2010’s value, the first increase recorded since 2007.